Baseball and the Courts : Czar’s Power Put to Test in Rose Case

When Kenesaw Mountain Landis was installed as major league baseball’s first commissioner 70 years ago, the sport was in crisis.

Several members of the Chicago White Sox had been indicted for working with bookmakers to throw the 1919 World Series. Faced with a loss of public confidence in the integrity of the game, baseball’s owners had turned to Landis, a federal judge, to bail them out.

Landis agreed to try only if he were given absolute control “over whatever and whoever had to do with” the sport. He wanted to establish the commissioner as someone not to be argued with--a kind of super umpire.

Setting an Example

In a written promise, the owners pledged to give him that authority. They said they would “set for the players an example of the sportsmanship that accepts the umpire’s decision without complaint.” They even promised not to challenge him in court.

Landis quickly set a harsh tone for a tenure that would last 20 years. The day after seven members of the White Sox were acquitted of criminal charges by a hometown jury, he expelled the players from baseball for life.

In an attempt to avoid a similar fate, Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose, who is accused of betting on his own team, has challenged in court the power of one of Landis’ successors, Bart Giamatti.

For Rose--who holds the baseball record for most career hits and has been viewed as a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame--what is at stake is not only his livelihood but also his place in baseball history.

For Giamatti, a former president of Yale University, the stakes are also high. He could become the first commissioner of any professional sport to lose his authority to discipline a player or manager.

Some experts view Rose’s legal maneuvering as the last gasp of a desperate, and guilty, man. But others say that, regardless of Rose’s guilt or innocence, his case could lead to major changes in the way professional athletes are governed by their leagues.

Threat to Discipline

Rose’s most melodramatic critics say that if he succeeds in persuading the court to forbid the commissioner to decide his guilt or innocence on the betting charges, he will destroy discipline in baseball--and perhaps all of sports--by opening commissioners’ decisions to second-guessing by the courts.

“Once you get started, then every kind of sports dispute--every time somebody gets suspended for three days, or even whether a ball is fair or foul--can wind up in court,” said U.S. District Judge Jim R. Carrigan of Colorado, an authority on sports law.

Added Tulane University law professor Gary Roberts, another sports law authority, “It could mean that the next time the NCAA calls the athletic director at the University of Kentucky and says, ‘We’ve got the goods on you,’ all the athletic director will have to do is run to a Kentucky alumnus who’s a judge and get an injunction barring the NCAA from taking action.”

Because the baseball commissioner’s power is so awesome and so buttressed by tradition, Rose is not challenging the commissioner directly. He is approaching his problem as would an ordinary worker whose boss is preparing to fire him unfairly, rather than as a celebrated sports figure accused of committing the national pastime’s cardinal sin by betting on his own team.

In effect, Rose is saying that it’s time for baseball to break out of the Landis era by giving him a hearing before a court or an arbitrator--anybody but the commissioner who has already investigated the betting charges and who, Rose says, has already privately concluded that he is guilty.

Court’s Viewpoint

Rose has had to tread carefully in challenging the commissioner’s authority. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has gone out of its way to make decisions by the baseball commissioner virtually sacrosanct.

In a ruling made in 1922 and widely derided as irrational, the Supreme Court said baseball was special in a way other professional sports were not. The court declared baseball exempt from federal antitrust laws that ban collusion among businesses, including other professional sports leagues, engaged in interstate commerce.

This exemption has limited the ability of baseball team owners to challenge the commissioner’s decisions. In football, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, for example, was able to argue successfully in court that other team owners had illegally--through the commissioner--ganged up on him to keep him from moving his team to Los Angeles. If Davis had owned a baseball rather than a football franchise, his antitrust argument would have gotten nowhere.

Baseball’s antitrust exemption has also limited the recourse of players and managers who are forced out of the game. They have been unable to argue that owners--acting through their commissioner--illegally conspired against them.

Players and managers forced out of other sports have been able to make the argument. However, since courts have generally taken a hands-off approach to professional sports altogether, it has not done them much good.

Players in baseball have, however, eroded the commissioner’s authority through collective bargaining advances such as free agency.

Because of the generally cautious approach by courts, authorities in sports law said they were surprised this week when a Cincinnati trial court judge issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of Rose, barring Giamatti from holding a hearing in the Rose case for at least two weeks.

Rose was careful not to challenge baseball’s rules against betting, or rules that give Giamatti the same dictatorial powers enjoyed by Landis--to be investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury in deciding the course of action in any matter that is in the best interests of baseball.

Such challenges would almost surely have failed, with courts saying that a voluntary association such as major league baseball can, within reason, make its own rules.

Instead, Rose chose to accuse the commissioner himself of breaking a baseball rule--a vague one requiring him to be fair. In doing so, Rose is looking beyond the parochial world of baseball, relying on recent court decisions involving ordinary workers who contend they were unjustly fired.

Some legal experts believe that, even if Rose succeeds, his case will not have wide impact. They say that Giamatti simply made an isolated public relations blunder when he signed a letter on behalf of convicted cocaine dealer Ron Peters, one of two key witnesses against Rose. The letter, addressed to the federal judge in Cincinnati who was scheduled to sentence Peters, said Giamatti believed Peters’ account of Rose’s alleged gambling.

The letter, which Giamatti asked the judge to keep secret, would have been routine for a prosecutor who wanted to reward a cooperative witness facing legal problems.

But because of Giamatti’s unique position as not only baseball’s prosecutor, but also its judge and jury, the letter raised eyebrows. The judge who got it, Carl Rubin, called his acquaintance of 60 years, Rose lawyer Reuven Katz. Katz recalled that the judge was shocked by the letter and decided to make it public.

The Rose defense team seized on the apparent opening and attempted to use it against Giamatti. They accused him of violating a baseball rule that Landis himself had written.

The rule requires the commissioner to conduct disciplinary activities in the manner of “judicial proceedings with due regard for all the principles of natural justice and fair play.”

Katz reasoned that if a judge were trying Rose and had written such a letter, the judge would have had to disqualify himself, and therefore, so should Giamatti.

Katz argued that the letter was evidence that Giamatti had decided Rose was guilty before he had conducted a formal hearing. He persuaded Cincinnati trial court Judge Norbert Nadel to grant the restraining order, delaying the Giamatti hearing for at least two weeks.

Rose’s lawyer noted that a professional sports league commissioner has been disqualified once before, citing basketball star Julius Erving’s 1971 contract dispute with the Virginia Squires of the American Basketball Assn. The league commissioner was disqualified from arbitrating that dispute because he was associated with a law firm that represented the Squires.

Baseball has no provision for the commissioner to disqualify himself, sports law authorities said.

Rose is trying to force the disqualification by taking advantage of recent court rulings that have granted employees limited rights to hold onto their jobs, said Stanford University law professor Bill Gould, an authority on sports and employment law.

One exception to the general rule that an employer can terminate his employee any time he wants to might apply to Rose. An employee can challenge a dismissal on the grounds that an employer broke one of his own company rules--for instance, not giving the worker a hearing as called for in the company’s employee manual.

But legal experts say Rose could be on shaky ground because he didn’t wait to be fired first.

Court records, however, are littered with cases of sports figures who waited, challenged the adverse decisions of commissioners and lost.

- In basketball, there was Jack Molinas, who admitted in 1954 placing several bets on his own team, the Fort Wayne Pistons, and winning $400. The National Basketball Assn. commissioner expelled him without a hearing. A New York state trial court refused his plea for reinstatement, saying that the lack of a hearing was incidental in light of Molinas’ admission that he had placed bets.

Molinas went to law school and tried again. This time he filed a suit alleging that the NBA had entered into a conspiracy with its member teams in restraint of trade, and had therefore violated the antitrust law, by banning him from the game.

U.S. District Judge Irving Kaufman, in a written opinion in 1961, turned Molinas down, saying that the NBA rules against gambling were reasonable and that a private association had every right to enforce its own reasonable rules.

- In bowling, there was Ralph Manoc, who sued the American Bowling Congress unsuccessfully in 1969 after it suspended him for violating its rules by bowling in tournaments with a partner who was using an assumed name.

Manoc claimed that the suspension--and a simultaneous boycott of a bowling device he had invented--was unreasonable and violated antitrust laws. But he did not present much evidence and a court refused to review his claim, citing a general policy not to accept challenges to decisions of voluntary associations unless it can be clearly shown that the associations acted in bad faith.

- And in hockey there was Gregory Neeld, a one-eyed player barred from the National Hockey League, which allowed only two-eyed players.

Neeld claimed that the league’s decision to bar him was anti-competitive and therefore an antitrust violation. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1979 that the reason for the league rule was “not anti-competitive but rather safety.”

The court held that safety was a reasonable concern, noting that “there is bound to be danger to players who happen to be on Neeld’s blind side,” and declined to intervene.

Courts have also held that rules against gambling are reasonable. As far as Rose’s future is concerned, it wouldn’t matter even if the commissioner found that he had only bet for the Reds to win games. He still would face expulsion, the reasoning goes, because he would be tempted to act against his team’s best interests by, for instance, risking serious injury to a star pitcher with a decision to keep him in the lineup even though the pitcher’s arm was sore.

ROSE WINS ONE--An Ohio appeals court rules that it has no authority to suspend an order that has prevented a hearing that could determine Pete Rose’s future in baseball. Sports, Page 1.